Will Alcatel-Lucent Choke on SIP?

SIP technology will occupy much of Alcatel-Lucent's innovation this year, but it's no guarantee of success.

This month, Alcatel-Lucent will rebrand its Eye-Box technology as the Extended Communications Server and add SIP support by October. Eye-Box is an open-source platform that integrates with Outlook. It provides a Web interface into core communications functions such as mail, collaborative applications, file transfer and address book.

So far, so good. Still worrisome is Alcatel's ability to negotiate the interoperability issues that plague SIP. Alliances and market perception help vendors persuade third parties to adopt their interpretation of the SIP specification. That's doesn't bode well for Alcatel-Lucent in the United States, where the company lacks the market share to rally other vendors. --David Greenfield, [email protected]